Living Wells: Sustaining Your Soul When You’re Pouring into Others - Glenna Marshall

There's a particular temptation that comes with ministry: letting your study for teaching become your own spiritual nourishment. You open the Bible to prepare for your women's group or your next talk, and it feels productive — it's still time in the Word, after all. But if that's your only time there, something quietly starts to dry out. You're not abiding. You're just creating content.

In this recorded teaching, Glenna Marshall — pastor's wife of 20 years, author, speaker, and women's Bible study leader — walks through John 15 to make the case that everything in ministry flows downstream from one thing: staying attached to the vine. Not as a chore, not to check a box, but because apart from Jesus, the branches wither.

Glenna unpacks three layers of what it means to abide:

• Abide for your own growth first — let your time in Scripture be for your own soul before it's for anyone else's; you are not a content creator, you are a branch, and branches need the vine to survive
• Abide with others — your growth and your church community's growth are inseparable; you will never graduate from your need for the local church, and the people you worship alongside are part of how you bear fruit
• Abide in the love of Jesus — you don't read Scripture to be loved; you're already loved; you read it to stay sure of that love, and the joy that follows is what overflows into everything else

The session also includes a rich Q&A on: what God's pruning has looked like in 20 years of ministry, how to maintain healthy relationships with your church when it also employs you, how to keep devotional prep from becoming just teaching prep, what to do in a dry season when you don't feel like opening your Bible, how to see your own spiritual growth when you're always focused on everyone else's, and how to decide what to study for your own personal growth.